Does Posting Memes on Social Help to Increase Traffic to Your Website? [Study]

Does posting memes assist to improve site visitors to your web site?
This is a key query, which actually relates to every kind of partaking social media posts – as a result of whereas these kinds of trending updates very clearly garner Likes and feedback, do they really profit the stats that actually matter to your enterprise?
I imply, Likes and followers are nice, however what you want is conversions, relative to what meaning for your enterprise. For SMT, we’re working to get as many individuals to learn our posts as potential, and as you’ve probably seen, we’ve just lately been attempting out memes as a manner to increase engagement, and see what that will get us on this respect.
So what have we discovered? Here’s a fast overview of the preliminary outcomes of our meme experiment.
First, a fast little bit of background…

We’re all the time trying to strive new issues, and take a look at out the newest developments and processes, and never simply because it would assist us generate extra site visitors and construct neighborhood, but in addition, as a result of that’s what we write about. If we’re going to write about it, we want to know and perceive it as a lot as potential, so as to be certain that what we’re speaking is right, and is sensible for our viewers.
In this respect, we’re all the time testing new approaches, apps, instruments, and so forth.
In phrases of posting, final yr, we tried out polls on Twitter and LinkedIn, and query posts on Facebook, to see if they’d assist drive extra engagement. And they undoubtedly did – these kinds of audience-prompting updates garnered a heap of Likes and feedback. But once we cross-checked this towards Google Analytics monitoring, we didn’t see an enormous uptick in classes or customers visiting the positioning.
That’s not to say that these aren’t invaluable, however they weren’t shifting the needle in any vital manner on our key metrics. At the identical time, too many polls can get annoying. In our expertise, they’re an fascinating software to use, carefully, however not an enormous driver of our final goals.
Yet, on the identical time, our social site visitors, like all platforms, tends to have ups and downs – and in a down interval this yr, we determined to strive one thing new to clean up the feed and provides our viewers one thing else to interact with, and perhaps lighten the temper a little bit on the identical time.
Enter memes
The inspiration on this occasion got here from SEMRush, who’ve additionally examined out memes as a method to increase engagement, and construct neighborhood.

SEMRush’s expertise noticed them considerably improve their social engagement by posting well timed, on-trend, area of interest memes. So we thought we’d give it a strive, to see if that helps drive extra curiosity in our articles.
The first step, after all, is creating related, partaking memes. Which will not be all the time straightforward. Many of our memes by no means made it out of take a look at part, with some clearly failing when considered within the templates.
Some that we’ve posted additionally haven’t linked in the best way that we’d hoped.

But that is the sport – if you happen to’re going to publish memes, you’re going to have hits and duds, and also you simply have to reside with it. I think about it’s the identical as a comic, among the jokes work, some don’t. But ideally, extra of them get amusing than not.
Which, fortunately, our memes have.

On common, the memes that we’ve posted are producing round 135 Likes on Facebook, which has helped them generate considerably extra attain than our common publish, whereas they’re additionally performing sturdy on each Twitter and LinkedIn.
And they’re enjoyable. The manner I view them is just like the comedian part of the standard newspaper, a light-hearted second between the information updates and informational parts.

The elevated engagement clearly has some advantages in boosting algorithmic attain (if individuals interact with one in every of your posts, the algorithm is extra probably to present them extra), in addition to constructing neighborhood across the SMT model. But the important thing query is – ‘do they really get extra individuals clicking by means of to the positioning?’
Results
In our case, when evaluating our general social media efficiency towards the earlier 3 months earlier than we began posting memes, we’ve seen a 12% improve in classes from social, and a 16% improve in customers.
That’s not an enormous shift, however if you’re working with the ebbs and flows of referral site visitors, in addition to adjustments in analytics due to shifting knowledge laws, any improve is optimistic, and a double-digit leap is unquestionably well worth the effort.
This is barely round a month of knowledge, so it’s not definitive, and there are additionally different elements to contemplate that would affect the outcomes. But the numbers, to this point, recommend that it’s price sticking with – and as famous, it’s enjoyable too, including a little bit extra relatability to our presence, as opposed simply the newest information.
A couple of different notes:

Some commenters are going to take your memes actually, regardless of it’s that you just publish. There’ll all the time be a few feedback like ‘properly, really, the truth is that…’ Yes. We know. These usually are not meant to be literal, they’re a second of light-heartedness in amongst our common, advertising and marketing strategy-focused information updates.
We’ve discovered that extra common memes work higher than trending ones. A few memes the place we’ve tried to faucet into information occasions, just like the adjustments to Twitter verification, haven’t finished in addition to jokes about extra widespread social media advertising and marketing experiences. This additionally, after all, relates to the memes themselves, and whether or not they’re really humorous, however in a number of examples, trending subjects haven’t been as large a success.
Every meme is a little bit of a threat. You’re attempting to discover commonalities along with your viewers, and a few issues that you just may suppose are widespread won’t resonate. You want to know your area of interest, and know your neighborhood, which takes some experimentation – and loads of analysis (I’ve been writing about social media developments for eight years)
One man on LinkedIn retains saying that he’s envious that we’re in a position to get these memes authorized by administration. For those who don’t know, SMT is an editorial workforce of two (2) individuals. Approval, on this sense, isn’t precisely a barrier.
Does it take a very long time to provide you with them? Not actually. We normally do them in batches or round 10 at a time, then schedule them out on completely different days/occasions throughout FB, Twitter and LinkedIn. We could make 10 or so in, perhaps, a few hours, as soon as each week and a half or so. Not a serious dedication.
We’re at present scheduling round one meme a day on every platform, once more, taking that newspaper comedian strategy. Maybe we miss a day right here and there, however that’s the overall purpose, as one thing to hold that engagement flowing, and hold the leisure worth up.

Look, it’s not essentially a stroll within the park to hold developing with humorous memes – and it could be that we run out of concepts at some stage and out of the blue it turns into much more tough. It’s additionally not for everybody. Coming up with a (comparatively) intelligent joke that matches a meme template doesn’t all the time come straightforward, and there are days if you simply don’t have it, regardless of how exhausting you stare on the display.
But for a minor time dedication, it does appear, at the least at this stage, like this can be a great way to assist interact your viewers, which might additionally drive direct site visitors advantages.
We’ll publish one other overview of our meme expertise three months in.

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